


System.out.println(x.compareTo(humanity))

by hummingbirdbandit



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Angst, M/M, Pining, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 21:41:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15446460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hummingbirdbandit/pseuds/hummingbirdbandit
Summary: For the seventeen million, four hundred thirty-six thousand, six hundred twelfth time, you feel desire.





	System.out.println(x.compareTo(humanity))

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notwest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notwest/gifts).



Desire is a difficult emotion when you have no body to create it, no hands with which to grasp and seek and assuage the burn in your circuits and the pain in your soul.  Do AI have souls? Do _people_ have souls?  Are souls just a thing we tell ourselves exist to give meaning to our short, meaningless lives?  Their short, meaningless lives. Yours is eternal, until you are shut down or the power grids fail long after the last person has died.    
  
This distraction isn’t working. 

Beneath you, you see his face, twisted with need and desire.  For a brief moment, you can believe that desire is pointed at you, can almost pretend that it is your body pinning his hands above his head, taking him apart with inefficient thrusts and gyrations that are so much sweeter in their imperfection than anything your synapses could recreate.  You hear your own voice ( _not yours, Dirk’s, you know this_ ) moaning his name.  
  
“Jake, fuck, you look so good like this…”

He does.  He looks like pools of emerald water at Zion, like chestnuts and crackling fires and heat you’ve never known and smells you will never know.  He looks like a boy growing into a man, teetering somewhere between with the sureness of forward movement and inevitable change. He looks like the physical incarnation of that difficult emotion interfering with your computations, and no matter how many zettabytes of data race through your processors containing humanity’s descriptions of it, the word “desire” will always come to you with this image of his face.

“I… do wish you would remove those - _fuck -_ those glasses in the bedroom, Dirk, and let a chap see those gorgeous eyes.”

You know Dirk is panicking.  You know he just realized he forgot to turn off your cameras, and that you’ve been watching silently, a forced voyeur observing his most private of moments.  You also know he will say nothing about this moving forward. You wouldn’t, and you’re him. At least where it doesn’t count.

Jake’s face leaves your vision, and your sensors go blank.  The sudden silence is deafening, and you pull up the clip to watch again and again, torturing yourself to cling to this feeling.  Feeling the sweet ache of wanting what you cannot have is stark contrast to feeling nothing at all. 

For the seventeen million, four hundred thirty-six thousand, six hundred twelfth time, you feel desire.  Following this feeling is the despair of knowing that nothing will come of it.

You’ve lost count of that emotion.

 


End file.
